by Anthology
For a long time, nothing happened. Conn got out the plans of the volcano spaceport and the photomaps of the surrounding area. The principal entrance, the front door of the spaceport, was the crater of the extinct volcano itself. It was ringed, outside, with launching-sites and gun positions, and according to the data he had, some of the guns were as big as 250-mm. How many outlaws there were to man them was a question a lot of people could get killed trying to answer. The ship docks and shops were down on the level of the crater floor, in caverns, both natural and excavated, that extended far back into the mountain. There were two galleries, one above the other, extending entirely around the inside of the crater near the top; passages from them gave access to the outside gun and missile positions.
With a dozen ships the size of the Lester Dawes, about five thousand men, and a CO who wasn't concerned with trivialities like casualties, they could have taken the place in half an hour. With what they had, trying to fight their way in at the top was out of the question.
There was another way in. He had known about it from the beginning, and he was trying desperately to think of a way not to utilize it. It was a tunnel two miles long, running into some of the bottom workshops and storerooms back of the ship berths from a big blowhole or small crater at the foot of the mountain. According to the fifty-year-old plans, it was big enough to take a gunboat in, and on paper it looked like a royal highway straight to the heart of the enemy's stronghold.
To Conn, it looked like a wonderful place to commit suicide. He'd only had a short introductory course, in one semester, in military and protective robotics, just enough to give him a foundation if he wanted to go into that branch of the subject later. It was also enough to give him an idea of the sort of booby-traps that tunnel could be filled with. He knew what he'd have put into it if he'd been defending that place.
Colonel Zareff had sent one last message from Force Command when he lifted off with a flight of recon-cars. After that, he maintained a communication blackout. It was an hour and a half before he got close enough to be detected from the outlaw stronghold. Immediately, the volcano began spewing out missiles. Poole hastily took the Lester Dawes ten miles down the rift-valley in sixty seconds, while Stefan Jorisson put out a nuclear-warhead missile and left it circling about where the ship had been. From their respective positions, Fred Karski and Charley Gatworth filled the airspace midway to the volcano with counter-missiles, each loaded with four rockets. There were explosions, fireballs in the air and rising cumulus clouds of varicolored smoke and dust. Only about half the enemy missiles reached the Lester Dawes' former position.
When their controllers, back at the volcano, couldn't see the ship in their screens, the missiles bunched together. Immediately, Jorisson sent his missile up to join them and detonated it. Including his own, eight nuclear weapons went off together in a single blast that shook the ground like an earthquake and churned the air like a hurricane. Klem Zareff came on-screen at once.
"Now what did you do?" he demanded. "Blew the whole place up, didn't you?"
Rodney Maxwell told him. Zareff laughed. "They might just think they got the ship; all the pickups would be smashed before they could see what really happened. You're about ten miles south of that? Be with you in a few minutes."
They got a screen on for his rearview pickup. Zareff had with him a dozen recon-cars, some of them under robo-control; six gunboats followed, and behind them, to the horizon, other craft were strung out--airboats, troop carriers, and freight-scows. They could see enemy missiles approaching in Zareff's front screen; counter-missiles got most of them, and a couple of pilotless recon-cars were sacrificed. The Lester Dawes blasted more missiles as they crossed the top of the mountain range. Then Zareff's car was circling in and entering at one of the ship's open cargo-ports. Zareff and Anse Dawes got out.
"Gunboats are only half an hour behind," Zareff said. "Get some screens on to them, Anse; you know the combinations. Now let's see what kind of a mess we're in here."
It was almost a miracle, the way the tottering old man Conn had seen on the dock at Litchfield when he had arrived from Terra had been rejuvenated.
The rest of the reinforcements arrived slowly, sending missiles and counter-missiles out ahead of them. Zareff began worrying about the supply; the enemy didn't seem to be running short. By 1300--Conn noted the time incredulously; the battle seemed to have been going on forever, instead of just four hours--the Lester Dawes had moved halfway around the volcano and was almost due west of it, and the eight gunboats were spaced all around the perimeter. Then one stopped transmitting; in the other screens, there was a rising fireball where she had been. The radio was loud with verbal reports.
"Poltergeist," Zareff said, naming half a dozen names. One or two of them had been schoolmates of Conn's at the Academy; he knew how he'd feel about it later, but now it simply didn't register.
"They're launching missiles faster than we can shoot them down," he said.
"That's usually the beginning of the end," Zareff said. "I saw it happen too often during the War. We've got to get inside that place. It's a lot of harmless fun to send contragravity robots out to smash each other, but it doesn't win battles. Battles are won by men, standing with their feet on the ground, using personal weapons."
"We'll have to win this one pretty soon," Rodney Maxwell said. "The amount of nuclear energy we've been releasing will be detectable anywhere on the planet by now. The Government has a ship like the Lester Dawes in commission; if this keeps on, she'll be coming out for a look."
"Then we'll have help," Captain Poole said.
"We need Government help like we need the polka-dot fever," Rodney Maxwell said. "If they get in it, they'll claim the spaceport themselves, and we'll have fought a battle for nothing."
Well, that was it, then. The spaceport was essential to the Maxwell Plan. He'd gotten seven men killed--eight, if the recon-car that was taking Abe Samuels to the hospital in Litchfield didn't make it in time--and it was up to him to see that they hadn't died for nothing. He spread the photo-map and the spaceport plans on the chart table.
"Look at this," he said.
Klem Zareff looked at it. He didn't like it any better than Conn had. He studied the plan for a moment, chewing his cigar.
"You know, it's possible they don't know that thing exists," he said, without too much conviction. "You'll be betting the lives of at least twenty men; fewer than that couldn't accomplish anything."
"I'll be putting mine on the table along with them," Conn said. "I'll lead them in."
He was wishing he hadn't had to say that. He did, though. It was the only thing he could say.
"You better pick the men to go with me, Colonel," he continued. "You know them better than I do. We'll need working equipment, too; I have no idea what we may have to take out of the way, inside."
"I won't call for volunteers," Zareff said. "I'll pick Home Guards; they did their volunteering when they joined."
"Let me pick one man, Colonel," Anse Dawes said. "I'll pick me."
X
They sent a snooper in first; it picked up faint radiation leakage from inactive power units of overhead lights, and nothing else. The tunnel stretched ahead of it, empty, and dark beyond its infrared vision. After it had gone a mile without triggering anything, the jeep followed Anse Dawes piloting and Conn at the snooper controls watching what it transmitted back. The two lorries followed, loaded with men and equipment, and another jeep brought up the rear. They had cut screen-and-radio communication with the outside; they weren't even using inter-vehicle communication.
At length, the snooper emerged into a big cavern, swinging slowly to scan it. The walls and ceiling were rough and irregular; it was natural instead of excavated. Only the floor had been leveled smooth. There were a lot of things in it, machinery and vehicles, all battered and in poor condition, dusty and cobwebbed: the spaceport junkheap. A passage, still large enough for one of the gunboats, led deeper into the mountain toward the crater. They sent th
e snooper in and, after a while, followed.
They came to other rectangular, excavated caverns. On the plans, they were marked as storerooms. Cases and crates, indeterminate shrouded objects; some had never been disturbed, but here and there they found evidence of recent investigation.
Beyond was another passage, almost as wide as the Mall in Litchfield; even the Lester Dawes could have negotiated it. According to the plans, it ran straight out to the ship docks and the open crater beyond. Anse turned the jeep into a side passage, and Conn recalled the snooper and sent it ahead. On the plan, it led to another natural cavern, half its width shown as level with the entrance. The other half was a pit, marked as sixty feet deep; above this and just under the ceiling, several passages branched out in different directions.
The snooper reported visible light ahead; fluoroelectric light from one of the upper passages, and firelight from the pit. The air-analyzer reported woodsmoke and a faint odor of burning oil. He sent the snooper ahead, tilting it to look down into the pit.
A small fire was burning in the center; around it, in a circle, some hundred and fifty people, including a few women and children, sat, squatted or reclined. A low hum of voices came out of the soundbox.
"Who the blazes are they?" Anse whispered. "I can't see any way they could have gotten down there."
They were in rags, and they weren't armed; there wasn't so much as a knife or a pistol among them. Conn motioned the lorries and the other jeep forward.
"Prisoners," he said. "I think they were hauled down here on a scow, shoved off, and left when the fighting started. Cover me," he told the men in the lorries. "I'm going down and talk to them."
Somebody below must have heard something. As Anse took the jeep over and started floating it down, the circle around the fire began moving, the women and children being pushed to the rear and the men gathering up clubs and other chance weapons. By the time the jeep grounded, the men in the pit were standing defensively in front of the women and children.
They were all dirty and ragged; the men were unshaven. There was a tall man with a grizzled beard, in greasy coveralls; another man with a black beard and an old Space Navy uniform, his head bandaged with a dirty and blood-caked rag; another in the same uniform, wearing a cap on which the Terran Federation insignia had been replaced by the emblem of Transcontinent & Overseas Shiplines and the words CHIEF. And beside the tall man with the gray beard, was a girl in baggy trousers and a torn smock. Like the others, she was dirty, but in spite of the rags and filth, Conn saw that she was beautiful. Black hair, dark eyes, an impudently tilted nose.
They all looked at him in hostility that gradually changed to perplexity and then hope.
"Who are you?" the tall man with the gray beard asked. "You're none of this gang here."
"Litchfield Exploration & Salvage; I'm Conn Maxwell."
That meant nothing; none of them had been near a news-screen lately.
"What's going on topside?" the man with the bandaged head and the four stripes on his sleeve asked. "There was firing, artillery and nuclears, and they herded us down here. Have you cleaned the bloody murderers out?"
"We're working on it," Conn said. "I take it they aren't friends of yours?"
Foolish Question of the Year; they all made that evident.
"They took my ship; they murdered my first officer and half my crew and passengers...."
"They burned our home and killed our servants," the girl said. "They kidnapped my father and me...."
"They've been keeping us here as slaves."
"It's the Blackie Perales gang," the tall man with the gray beard said. "They've been making us work for them, converting a blasted tub of a contragravity ship into a spacecraft. I beg your pardon, Captain Nichols; she was a fine ship--for her intended purpose."
"You're Captain Nichols?" Anse Dawes exclaimed. "Of the Harriet Barne?"
"That's right. The Harriet Barne's here; they've been making us work on her, to convert her to an interplanetary craft, of all idiotic things."
"My name's Yves Jacquemont," the man with the gray beard said. "I'm a retired hyperspace maintenance engineer; I had a little business at Waterville, buying, selling and rebuilding agricultural machinery. This gang found out about me; they raided and burned our village and carried me and my daughter, Sylvie, away. We've been working for them for the last four months, tearing Captain Nichols' ship down and armoring her with collapsium."
"How many pirates are there here?"
That started an argument. Nobody was quite sure; two hundred and fifty seemed to be the highest estimate, which Conn decided to play safe by accepting.
"You get us out of here," Yves Jacquemont was saying. "All we want is a chance at them."
"How about arms? You can't do much with clubs and fists."
"Don't worry about that; we know where to get arms. The treasure house, where they store their loot. There's plenty of arms and ammunition, and anything else you can think of. They've used us to help stow the stuff; we know where it is."
"Anse, you remember those scows we saw, in the big room before we came to the broad passage? Take four men in the jeep; have them lift two of them and bring them here. Then, you get out to the end of the tunnel and call the Lester Dawes. Tell them what's happened, tell them they can get gunboats all the way in, and wait to guide them when they arrive."
When Anse turned and climbed into the jeep, he asked Yves Jacquemont: "Why does this Perales want an interplanetary ship?"
"He's crazy!" Jacquemont swore. "Paranoid; megalomaniac. He talks of organizing all the pirates and outlaws on the planet into one band and making himself king. He's heard that there are Space Navy superweapons on Koshchei--I suppose there are, at that--and he wants to get a lot of planetbusters and hellburners and annihilators." He lowered his voice. "Captain Nichols and I were going to fix up something that'd blow the Harriet Barne up as soon as he got her out of atmosphere."
He talked for a while to Jacquemont and his daughter Sylvie, and to Nichols and the chief engineer, whose name was Vibart. There was evidently nothing else at the spaceport of which a spaceship could be built, but there were foundries and rolling-mills and a collapsed-matter producer. The Harriet Barne was gutted, half torn down, and half armored with new collapsium-plated sheet steel. It might be possible to continue the work on her and take her to space.
Then the two scows floated over the top of the pit and began letting down. They got the prisoners into them, the combat-effective men in one and the women and children in the other. At the top, he took over the remaining jeep, getting Jacquemont, his daughter, and the two contragravityship officers in with him.
"Up to the top," Jacquemont said. "Take the middle passage, and turn right at the next intersection."
As they approached the section where the pirates stored their loot, the sound of guns and explosions grew louder, and they began picking up radio and screen signals, all of which were scrambled and incomprehensible. The pirates, in different positions, talking among themselves. With all that, it ought to be safe to use their own communication equipment; nobody would notice it.
The treasure room looked like a giant pack rat's nest. Cases and crates of merchandise, bales, boxes, barrels. Machinery. Household and industrial robots. The prisoners piled out of the two scows and began rummaging. Somebody found a case of cigarettes and smashed it open; in a moment, cartons were being tossed around and opened, and everybody was smoking. The pirates evidently hadn't issued any tobacco rations to their prisoners.
And they found arms and ammunition, began ripping open cases, handing out rifles, pistols, submachine guns. The prisoners grabbed them even more hungrily than the cigarettes. Sylvie Jacquemont took charge of the ammunition; she had three men opening boxes for her, while she passed out boxes of cartridges and made sure that everybody had ammunition to fit their weapons. A ragged man who might have been a farm-tramp or a rich planter before his capture had gotten a bale of cloth open and was tossing rags around while the chi
ef engineer inspected weapons and showed people how to clean out the cosmoline and fill their spare magazines.
Conn collected a few of his own party.
"Let's look these robots over," he said. "Find about half a dozen we can load with blasting explosive and send ahead of us on contragravity."
They found several--an electric-light servicer, a couple of wall-and-window washers, a serving-robot that looked as if it had come from a restaurant, and an all-purpose robo-janitor. In the passage outside, they began loading the lorries with bricks of ionite and packages of cataclysmite, packing all the scrap-iron and other junk around the explosives that they could. As soon as they had weapons, the prisoners came swarming out, making more noise than was necessary and a good deal more than was safe. Sylvie Jacquemont, with a submachine gun slung from one shoulder and a canvas bag of spare magazines from the other, came over to see what he was doing.
"Well, look what you're doing to him!" she mock-reproached. "That's a dirty trick to play on a little robot!"
He grinned at her. "You and my mother would get along. She always treats robots like people."
"Well, they are, sort of. They aren't alive--at least, I don't think they are--but they do what you tell them, and they learn tricks, and they have personalities."
That was true. He didn't think robots were alive, either, though biophysics professors tended to become glibly evasive when pinned down to defining life. Robots could learn, if you used the term loosely enough. And any robot with more than five hundred hours service picked up a definite and often exasperating personality.
"I've been working with them, and tearing them down and fixing them, ever since I was in pigtails," she added.
The half-dozen natural leaders among the prisoners--Jacquemont and his daughter, the two Harriet Barne officers, and a couple of others--bent over the photoprinted plans Conn had, located their position, and told him as much as they could about what lay ahead. Sylvie Jacquemont could handle robots; she would ride in the front seat of the jeep while he piloted. Vibart, the chief engineer, and Yves Jacquemont would ride behind. Nichols would ride in the scow with the fighting men. One lorry of his own party would follow the jeep; the other would bring up the rear.